Piracy attacks fell for the first time in five years
but the number of seafarers dying tripled in the last two years.
Will the longshoremen on the US East Coast strike
this fall? Many shippers think so. And the uncertainty created by a squabble
between Oregon unions as to who plugs in refrigerated containers caused
shippers in Idaho to use trucking rather than barges.
Congress mandated (but did not fund the $16 billion
estimated cost) 100 percent scanning in foreign ports of all US-bound maritime
containers. The Department of Homeland Security officially notified Congress
that 100 percent scanning is neither the most efficient nor the cost-effective
way to protect against nuclear terrorism so the July 1 deadline was deferred
for two years.
The US Navy is going ahead with plans to convert much
of its fleet to biofuels (currently at $26 a gallon) despite opposition from
members of Congress who say it is the wrong thing to do at a time when the US
military faces nearly $500 billion in budget cuts.
In a precedent-setting case, a former chief officer
was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars after he claimed that he had
suffered heart damage as a result of working 16 hours a day at sea and had to
take early retirement at the age of 54.
The US was willing to lend Great Britain the
amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima if the UK lost use of
its aircraft carriers HMS Hermes or HMS Invincible during the
1982 Falkland War. Guidance was provided by President Reagan who stated, "Give
Maggie everything she needs to get on with it."
Thin Places
and Hard Knocks
In the West Philippine Sea, the Filipino fishing boat
AXL
John was run down by a ship. A survivor said it had the words “Hong
Kong” on its transom. Authorities said the Hong Kong-based bulker Peach
Mountain was the only ship in the area but the survivor wasn’t sure it
was the Peach Mountain that hit his F/V. The incident threatened to
complicate the dispute over Scarborough Shoal, which both countries claim.
In the Sea of Japan, about 100 nm south of Nkhodka
while en route to Okhotsk Sea for fishing, the Russian oceanic trawler/fish
factory Ardatov caught fire. The crew put out the fire but all power
was lost and the salvage tug Lazurit took the F/V in tow,
probably for Nakhodka. In Olso Fjord, the three-masted superyacht Eos,
valued at $150 million, caught fire while at anchor. All 18 on board were
evacuated and the vessel was moved closer to shore for more-effective
firefighting. The big yacht features the DynaRig sail system, described later.
A worker on the break-bulk (un-containerized general
cargo) cargo ship Thorco Atlantic docked in the Houston Ship Channel died
following a fall into a cargo bay. At Anchorage, Alaska, a security guard died
when he drove his truck off a pier.
The Coast Guard rescued four fishermen from the
58-foot Quest. Three were in a liferaft and one was in the water when
the rescue chopper arrived 17 miles off Westport, Washington. While 725 miles
southwest of Alaska’s Dutch Harbor, the container ship Santa Rufina needed
medical help for a 37-year-old ship’s engineer suffering a head wound and back
pain. His evacuation was coordinated through the rescue coordination center in
Bremen, Germany but it was an Alaskan-based Coast Guard chopper that made the
flight after the ship had moved within helicopter range. Anther Alaskan chopper
took a female passenger suffering from heart problems and difficulty in
breathing off the Celebrity Century.
At St Louis, a worker on a towboat spotted a bass
boat carrying five people pinned against a barge by the Mississippi River’s
current. Getting into a small boat with a fellow worker, he went to the rescue.
He fell overboard when one of the young children fell from the boat. The
rescuer lifted the toddler into its mother’s arms but was then sucked under the
barge. He died of his injuries but everyone else was safe.
AMVER (originally the Atlantic Merchant Vessel
Emergency Reporting System) is a voluntary worldwide network of ships that will
go to the rescue of mariners when requested by the US Coast Guard. (Other
nations have similar systems and they cooperate nicely.) Some 40 miles west off
the coast of La Playa, Mexico, a California yachtsman was whale-watching when a
whale came up under (or onto – reports differed) his 50-foot sailboat Reflection
and broke off the rudder and propeller and the boat started taking on
water. He activated his EPIRB and three hours later a Coast Guard HC-130 was
overhead. Meanwhile, the geared bulker Ocean Virgo was only 60 miles away and responding to an AMVER request for a
rescue. The yachtsman, who lost his boat, was nearing the end of a twelve-year
circumnavigation. Farther west, the Golden Eagle II, a Honolulu–based fishing vessel caught fire 316 miles northeast
of Johnston Island. Alerted by two EPIRBs and a radioed report from an onboard
NOAA fisheries observer, the Coast Guard asked the AMVER-registered
Panamanian-flagged wood chip carrier Forestal Diamante to help. The
751-foot ship was 60 miles from the distress location and it picked up the
seven on board the F/V. The bulker was heading for Japan but it might have
dropped them off at Guam. (Incidentally, the Coast Guard had radioed a photo of
the F/V so the freighter could identify it.) Last to be rescued by an AMVER
ship were two men even farther west. They and their 23-foot skiff were reported
overdue on a voyage from Namwin Atoll to Weno, Chuuk (the “Truk” of World War
II fame). The AMVER-participating bulker Solar Africa was able to locate them
and then sailed towards Chuuk to meet a local fishing vessel for a
people-transfer.
Two sailboats returning from the Newport-Bermuda Race
needed help. The Norwegian Star picked six off the 41-foot Avenir after it lost its rudder and a jury
rudder system failed to work about 230 miles northwest of Bermuda. About the
same time, a crewmember on the 42-foot Convictus Maximus suffered a head
injury with possible spinal damage, and the sloop headed back to Bermuda,
escorted by the Norwegian crude-oil tanker SKS Satilla. (In 2009 off Galveston, Texas, this 159,000-ton tanker ran over
the remains of the mobile offshore drilling rig Ensco 74, sunk during
Hurricane Ike in September 2008, and that allision badly ripped the underbelly
of the tanker. No oil was spilt, however, because of the tanker’s double hull.)
It was a routine tow of a barge from Florida’s
Captiva Island to Cancun but the tug (name never specified) sank due to
Tropical Storm Debby. Explained one crewman later, ”The rain was so tremendous.
It was like a zillion marbles…. We’ve lost power, our filters are clogged, our
engines are running at less than half throttle and we have to abandon our load
and find help because we are headed for the center of the Gulf of Mexico.” The
two boarded a liferaft and it was their home for the next nine days. They ate
fish and carefully rationed the raft’s emergency water supply. Meanwhile the
Coast Guard found the barge, capsized but floating with its bow sticking
vertically upward, and families began planning funerals. Then along came the
tug Rikki
S….
The container ship Algarrobo arrived at
Auckland from Brisbane and Singapore after sustaining hull cracks in a storm
off Australia. Inspection revealed finger-wide cracks in deck coamings on both
sides of the vessel and so authorities ruled that the vessel must be completely
unloaded before heading for an Asian shipyard for repairs. (This Algarrobo
was built in 2009. It replaced an earlier oil/ore-carrier of the same
name that disappeared without trace in 1990 while carrying iron ore from Chile
for Japan.) In Denmark, the tug Skuld was towing a drill rig into
Esbjerg when its engine failed and it collided with the rig and badly holed
itself. Two other tugs involved in the rig-tow quickly lashed themselves to the
sinking Skuld and carried it to an Esbjerg quay and the waiting pumps
of local fire engines.
Gray Fleets
Off the US West Coast, the amphibious assault ship USS
Essex, based in Japan for the last twelve years and overdue for a
maintenance spell, was lining up for refueling when it collided with the
replenishment oiler USNS Yukon due to a steering failure. Compounding the incident
was “a breakdown in command and control, in bridge resource management, and in
communication between the two ships.” Damage will keep both ships in repair
yards for months. The commanding officer of the Essex was relieved of
command for “loss of confidence in his ability to command.” No information was
released about what happened to the oiler’s civilian master’s career.
The Royal Australian Navy will hire the Spanish
Navy’s combat supply ship Cantabria to supply
training-exercise support for one year.
The remains of the World War I British submarine HMS
E14 were found only 800 feet from the Turkish town of Kumkale’s beach.
In January 1918, the sub had maneuvered twenty miles through dense minefields
in the heavily fortified Dardanelles – the narrow straits between modern-day
Turkey’s European and Asian coasts, on a mission to sink the flagship of the
Turkish fleet. Not finding it, the sub attacked a Turkish merchant ship. A
torpedo’s premature explosion forced the sub to surface and Turkish guns sank
it. The sub’s commanding officer knew his submarine could not reach the open
sea and directed it towards a nearby beach in an effort to save the crew. The
Victoria Cross was awarded posthumously. Earlier, during the Gallipoli
campaign, the sub’s then-CO was also awarded the VC for sinking an Ottoman
gunboat and a troop ship and disabling a warship while deep in enemy territory.
Royal Navy divers, highly trained in identifying
underwater enemy mines, joined the Dubai Police search for a missing British
Navy sailor who was “poured” into a taxi by shipmates for return to his ship
but was never seen again. The search will focus on the waters around Port
Rashid, the area where his ship, HMS Westminster, was berthed.
White Fleets
In May, 2010, the cruise ship Clipper Adventure ran
aground on an uncharted rock shelf in Coronation Gulf, near Kugluktuk, Nunavut.
No one was injured but passengers and crew were forced to stay on the stranded
ship for almost two days until a Canadian icebreaker took them to Kugluktuk. It
took more than two weeks before the cruise ship was refloated and taken to a
shipyard in Poland for repairs. Now, the owners are suing the Canadian
government for $12 million for salvage and repair costs, another $2.6 million
for loss of business, and a mere $350,000 for other costs. The suit was based
on a claim that the government knew about the ledge since September 2007 but
failed to inform mariners. The captain claimed his chart showed 29 meters of
water where there were actually only three meters. The government counter-sued
for nearly half a million for expenses of the icebreaker Amundsen, which rescued
the cruise ship’s 128 passengers, and the Sir Wilfred Laurier (a nav-aids
tender and light icebreaker), which monitored the salvage operation.
Those That
Go Back and Forth
A fire shut down BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train
service between San Francisco and Oakland. Starting at a senior housing
construction site, the fire spread to BART property, damaging track insulators,
communications cables, electrical cables, and other trackside equipment.
Several ferry companies put additional boats into service and, apparently quite
smoothly, handled passenger loads up to five times the norm until rail service
was restored.
In Europe, the fast ferry Condor Express
experienced high winds while sailing from Poole to Jersey via Guernsey but when
winds of about 65 knots hit the ferry near Alderney, three crew were injured
and 25 cars were damaged.
In the UK, music-lovers hoping to attend the Isle of
Wight Festival were stranded on three ferries that were unable to unload cars
because massive rains had turned parking lots into mud baths. Vehicle traffic
was totally blocked as far back as Fishbourne.
In Indonesia, the manifest of the wooden ferry Putri
Ayu listed 27 people on board when the ship departed from Ambon toward
Namrole in the neighboring district of Buru Selatan. But twelve survived,
fourteen bodies were recovered, and another 44 were missing after the ferry
capsized and sank in rough weather and high waves.
Legal
Matters
Aircraft carriers do not normally participate in
anti-drug operations but the carrier USS Nimitz, cruiser USS
Princeton, and various US Coast Guard and Mexican Navy vessels
recovered 19,000 pounds of marijuana dumped overboard by two small boats about
85 miles off the Mexican coast in international waters.
Nature
Sea levels along the US East Coast are rising three
to four times faster than globally, with a 600-mile stretch from Cape Hatteras,
NC to north of Boston being a hot-spot. (We’re talking about 2-4 millimeters
per year vs an average global 1-mm rise). The hot-spot may be due to slowing of
Atlantic Ocean circulation.
US Navy scientists have developed a solar cell that works
in thirty feet (nine meters) of water. Sunlight does not penetrate far into
water so ordinary solar cells using crystalline silicon are of little use. The
Navy’s cells use gallium indium phosphide, which works best for wavelengths
between 400 and 700 nanometers, the typical range of light found underwater.
A British university is designing the world’s first 100 percent
fossil fuel-free sailing cargo ships. The propulsion system would use an
engine fueled by waste-derived liquid methane (from pig manure, perhaps?) and
the square-sailed DynaRig system. It has rotatable masts, fixed yards, and
sails that furl into the mast and is used on the 305-foot (93 meters) Eos and
the 2006-built, “proof-of-concept” 290-foot (88 meters) Maltese Falcon superyachts.
(The traditional sail names are still used, with the Courses on the bottom,
then the Topsails, the Gallants, and finally the Royals.)
Metal-Bashing
Salvage of the wrecked cruise ship Costa
Concordia has started and a salvor boldly stated, "We aim to get
it upright at the start of this winter and refloat in early 2013." The
operation is expected to cost more than $300 million. Time-lapse coverage of
the salvage is available at http://thelastsalute.eu during Italian daylight
hours. The rock imbedded into the side of the wreck will be removed and made
into a memorial to the 32 who died.Asiatic ship scrappers were busy enough that prices offered were low. Several dry vessels only fetched prices in the mid-to-high $300s per ldt, with tankers fetching $20 or $30 more up to $400 per ldt.
In Texas, the 100-year-old battleship USS Texas, now a battle memorial at San Jacinto and flagship of the Texas Navy, was in danger of sinking from sudden leaks. The memorial was closed to the public while repairs were made. At Philadelphia, curators warned that the waterlines plates of the protected cruiser USS Olympia were dangerously thin and actually leaking. Commissioned in 1895, this vessel became famous as the flagship of Commodore George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War in 1898.
Imports
The empty Honduran-flagged coaster Jireh ran up on the shore of
Puerto Rico’s Mona Island. On the vessel were five crewmembers and 79
undocumented Haitians. The island, only 38 miles from the Dominican Republic,
is a popular destination for Cuban illegals because under the US government’s
so-called wet foot/dry foot immigration policy, any Cuban who makes it to shore
("dry feet") on US property gets a chance to remain in the United
States and qualify for expedited "legal permanent resident"
status and, eventually, US citizenship. The uninhabited island, about midway
between Mayaguez, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, is a nature preserve
and the reefs around the island are popular dive sites and the island
remained pristine since the vessel leaked no oil.
A small Haitian wooden boat carrying US-bound illegal
migrants capsized to the south of Hawksbill Key in the Bahamas. Only five of 28
Haitians survived. The dead included the captain’s five children and he was
wanted by police for questioning.
A Sri Lankan refugee boat carrying perhaps 200 people
issued a distress call and then capsized off Australia's remote Christmas
Island in the Indian Ocean. At least ninety people drowned but the few
survivors were wearing lifejackets. A week later, a similar refugee boat sank
off the northwest of Australia, 107 nautical miles from Christmas Island and
about 13 nautical miles from the previous sinking, and ten died. (In the first
six months of this year, 62 vessels carrying 4,484 boatpeople were intercepted
off Australia.)
Nasties and
Territorial Imperatives
It was not a good month for regional piracy-fighters.
When the UAE government suddenly withdrew funding, a private firm providing
training departed and the UN-encouraged Puntland Maritime Police Force, an
armed counter-piracy militia operating inside the Somali state, ceased
operations. More than 600 Somali soldiers had been actively targeting pirate
activity. And, in a protest over pay, the Yemeni Coast Guard, trained by Royal
Navy personnel in recent years, blocked four main ports, including Aden and the
Red Sea ports of Mokha, Hodeidah, and Saleef. One authority sadly noted, “The
YCG was becoming quite effective in providing support for international
counter-piracy actions, particularly where its own fishing and other vessels
were involved.”
Three organizations use ships from about thirty-six
nations to fight piracy in the Combined Maritime Forces; EU NAVFOR (Operation
Atalanta); and NATO (Operation Ocean Shield incorporating both NATO and
non-NATO ships). Warships range from US aircraft carriers to a Seychelles’
coastguard patrol boat.
Odd Bits and Head-Shaker
China’s research submersible Jiaolong
descended below 7,000 meters. "Breaking the 7,000-meter mark means China
has obtained the capability of exploring 99.8 percent of the deep ocean with
manned submersibles," stated the on-scene commander. Only twelve
operational manned submersibles throughout the world can descend to 1,000
meters and even fewer can dive deeper. Before China's successful dives, only
manned submersibles of the United States, Japan, France and Russia have dived
below 6,000 meters.
Deep-six something and it’s gone forever, right? Not always.
Bottom-scouring by cruise-ship bow thrusters at Seattle’s piers 90 and 91
uncovered a metallic object that police divers doing a routine security sweep
recognized as ammo. They quickly surfaced, ”beating their bubbles to the
surface,” as one later described it. A detailed and cautious two-year cleanup
of the area, used by the US Navy from 1936 through the late Sixties, revealed
much junk but only a few small explosive devices (fuses). Also found was much
carelessly discarded kitchenware, some old (Navy), some modern (cruise ships).
At Port Newark in New Jersey, a Coast Guard boarding
team on the Ville D'Aquarius heard knocking. It continued for six hours,
gradually fading until it stopped. More than 160 containers were unloaded and
searched by humans, dogs, and an X-ray machine but no stowaways were found and
the ship was released to sail to Norfolk. Its last stop had been in Egypt.
The new superintendent of the US Merchant Marine
Academy is a retired Army colonel, most recently a professor teaching
international relations.
